


Watching

by seekingsquake



Series: If Seeing Is Believing Then Believe That We Have Lost Our Minds [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Feels, Bruce Needs a Hug, Clint's a good guy, Gen, Pre-The Avengers, Pre-The Incredible Hulk, mentions of mutants/implies X-Men, watching the monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 19:37:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1869846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm with SHIELD. We're here to protect you."<br/>"And who's protecting you from me?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watching

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little thing that popped into my head while I was woking on something else. I do not own anything having to do with Marvel, Hawkeye, or Hulk.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out :]

The target is holed up in some run down shack along the Luando river, almost in the centre of the triangle created by the cities of Malaje, Kuito, and Luena. The country of Angola has not been kind to him, and when Clint and the surveillance team get there to take over for Sitwell’s unit, he is little more than a grimey bag of bones.

“When was the last time he ate?” one of Clint’s company asks.

“Don’t concern yourselves,” Sitwell states as he slings his bag up into the chopper. “He’ll live. Just keep any military personnel off his tail and note everything.” _And don’t get caught_ is left unsaid, but is ringing in everyone’s ears nonetheless. They’d read this guy’s files, seen the footage, knew that they’d be dead in under a second and no one would be able to stop it. Then Sitwell’s gone, and it’s just them in the African plains, left to watch a target that has SHIELD scrambling.

There are five guys on the surveillance team. Berkeley and Watts, who had both trained in hand to hand combat with Tash, Thomas, who had been under Hill’s wing for a good five years, Marello, an engineer reaped right from Tony Stark’s collection of geniuses, and Clint himself, who’s never missed a shot. Five strong men with versatile skills and sharp minds, five of SHIELD’s best, sent to watch one man from a distance under the order, direct from Fury, _do not engage the target under any circumstance. And do not, ever, shoot at him. Ever. Understood?_

Clint is used to surveillance details, but this is going to be a weird mission. He is used to ending things with a silent flurry of hand signals that would result in one of his arrows between the target’s eyes. He is used to waiting for someone to give him the go ahead to end things so that his team could get out of dodge. He is decidedly not used to being told to hold fire indefinitely. He is not used to being told not to shoot the target. But the target this time isn’t a run of the mill weapons smuggler, drug lord, human trafficker, or whathaveyou. This target doesn’t even have anything to do with mutants or magic or billionaires that turned themselves into superheroes for fun. This target is not something any of them have been trained for.

* * *

The first month is uneventful. The target doesn’t eat much, hardly sleeps, and travels everywhere on foot. His shotty home base is in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, so it’s hard to be close enough to keep an eye on him unless he ventures into one of the cities. At one point he receives a gash in his left thigh, and he panics momentarily before cauterizing the wound and blacking out on the riverbank. Marello panics for a lot longer than that before requesting to be pulled from the team.

“This is nuts, Barton!” he hisses, eyes wide and wild. “We’re gonna get killed out here, man!”

“Sitwell’s unit was fine,” Clint snaps, eyes never straying from their target’s slumped form.

“If they were fine, why’d they get pulled, huh? If they had it under control why are we here instead?”

Berkeley cut in then with, “I just want to know where the fucking blowtorch came from. Seriously, how did we not notice he had that?”

Clint silences them as the target starts to stir, and when he sits up Clint can’t help but notice the deep lines of exhaustion carved into his face. For a guy who is only thirty eight, the target carries himself like a nervous old man, carries himself like he’s been to war and back, like the weariness has bloomed in the marrow of his bones and is blossoming like an inoperable cancer.

They all watch as he pulls himself up out of the dirt and hobbles toward the lean-to he’s constructed under a cluster of trees. He cuts his pants off and wraps the fabric tightly around the burned flesh of his leg, and doesn’t appear bothered in the slightest by his nakedness. In the notes Sitwell had left it was stated that the target appeared to have next to no self consciousness, but could act the embarrassed fool like his life depended on it. By all accounts it didn’t, but his freedom sort of did, so Clint figures it’s good the guy can act.

* * *

Marello doesn’t get pulled from the squad, and the next month things get interesting. They have moved from Angola and are now stationed in northern Cameroon. The target is doing well in Maroua; he’s found people willing to house him in their attic, and he has a job fixing equipment for one of the surrounding cotton plantations. Because he has money, he almost always has enough to eat a meal a day and keep clothes on his back. The target has fallen into a shaky sort of routine, and it makes watching him easy.

Shit doesn’t hit the fan until things start getting easy though, so Clint really should have seen this coming.

Watts and Thomas are supposed to be monitoring military movement in the area, but they somehow miss the unit that is systematically working its way through the surrounding villages. Somehow they have all become complacent after two months of shadowing a target that showed them nothing but docile calm and a willingness to help the sick people around him. Nobody noticed that the military was on the target until the house he’d been living in exploded.

Berkeley’s voice is frantic over the comm unit. “Was the family inside?”

“No,” Marello responds. “But the target was.”

There is a roar that emanates from the wreckage, and then a huge form is up and leaping into the mountains, howling and smashing everything in the vicinity as it goes. They have all seen the footage and the photos, but there is something very different about seeing it for real.

“Holy fuck,” Watts whispers, and that is Clint’s sentiment exactly. Holy fuck indeed.

“Thomas, Watts, Berkeley, keep your eyes on the target at all times. Follow him and report back to me every half hour. Don’t lose him. Marello, you’re with me. We’re taking out these bastards,” Clint orders, and then they’re all off.  

It only takes him and Marello forty minutes to find the military squad and disable all their mobile units. Clint sees the General that Sitwell and Fury had warned him about, and for a split second visualized planting an arrow right between those thick brows of his. “Lets get out of here,” Marello interrupts, and the two take off to catch up with the others.

When they catch up with the rest of the squad, everyone’s camped out in the canopy of the forest on the outskirts of a clearing. The target is the middle, small and tired and human, naked and screaming. He’s slumped against the ground, his face in the dirt, hands curled into fists by his head. His shoulders are shaking, and in between sobs that shake Clint to his core the target is screaming, “Fuck!” over and over into the ground. All the wildlife have long since fled, and the target carries on like this for over an hour. His voice gives out and his sobs turn to raspy wheezes, but he doesn’t rise from his place in the dirt. He lays there through the night shivering but refusing to move, and no one can do anything except watch him and keep an eye on the area.

* * *

When the target finally forces himself to move again, he doesn’t stop. He takes them on a wild goose chase that doesn’t end until he gets to Sri Lanka, and they’d almost lost him a handful times. He has the right idea though, because the US military has been on his tail as well, and that damned General is unorthodox and unprecedented, and a completely uncommon type of asshole.

Clint is familiar with assholes. He kills them on a semi-regular basis. He knows their types. There are ignorant assholes and pretentious assholes and assholes who know when they’ve taken it too far. But this General is not any of those. This General is the most dangerous type of asshole of all: the Asshole with a Goal.

The General has proven that he will rampage around the fucking world to get his grubby hands on the target, but he’s Clint’s target now, and Clint would also describe himself as an asshole with a goal, so it looks like they’re going to be stuck at an impasse for the foreseeable future. Clint’s mission isn’t complete until Fury deems it to be, and so he will beat the military back from his target with a fucking stick for the rest of his life if he has to.

Things have been touch and go since Cameroon though, and there have been six incidents in the past two months; a bad streak since he’d gone six months before that with no problems. Fury is in a constant state of, well, fury, and Clint isn’t faring much better.

“We’re doing the best we can, _Sir_ ,” he’d gritted out over a video call one evening.

And Fury had replied with a terse and angry, “Well do your best _better_ ,” before hanging up. Clint almost slams his fist into the wall in frustration, but takes a deep breath and re-strings his bow instead.

* * *

The target hasn’t eaten for three days, and drinks a lot of water that would be too dirty for other people to safely ingest. Clint wants to help but knows better, so he just trails behind him as he wanders through the market. He watches as the target steals a banana and a few carrots off a vendor cart, and sighs heavily as he watches the target give the stolen food to a group of children who look a lot less homeless than he does. He wants to grab the target by the shoulders and shake him, he wants to say _those kids are scammers and you’re severely malnourished_ but he just follows behind him and bites his tongue.

He hears a scuffle of some sort over the comm unit, and when he checks in with his team nobody answers him. It’s then that he notices that he’s once again lost the target. He swears and keeps walking, alert and searching for his target or his team or anything at all, and is caught completely off guard by a hand on the back of his neck.

He’s dragged into a back alley and up a fight of stairs that lead to a rooftop terrace, and he has to remind himself not to fight, remind himself to not cause a scene. Tash is good at groundwork, and blending in with people, but it’s not Clint’s thing and he has to tell himself over and over to stay calm and not fight back until he has a better understanding of what’s going on.

When they get to the top of the stairs he’s released and spun around, shoved against the nearest wall, and is eye to eye with the target. The muzzle of a gun is pushed against his sternum, and the target’s eyes are wide and very brown. That’s good, Clint thinks briefly before the target starts talking.

“You’re not military, and neither are your boys. FBI? CIA? Who are you?” His voice is hard and demanding, but his eyes give away how scared he is.

Clint knows this man. He’s read his file. Shit, he’s compiled over half of the file. He knows that he’s not supposed to do what he’s thinking of doing. He knows that Fury will kill him, and that Coulson won’t be able to save him this time, and that if he somehow makes it past the two of them, Hill and Tash will kill him even better. But he knows this man, and he knows what this man needs, and that means breaking the rules. He doesn’t expect to bring him back to SHIELD like he brought Tash back, but he expects that he’ll at least be able to walk off this rooftop without injury.

“Bobby. I’m Clint. I’m from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. I--,”

“SHIELD?” the target interrupts, and then laughs. It’s tense and angry and a little disbelieving.

“You’ve heard of us?” Clint asks and the target nods slowly.

His eyes are guarded as he says, “After mutants started making themselves known, it was rumoured that SHIELD was taking handfuls of them into programs or something. I heard they were poaching scientists from universities around the US and trying to set up some sort of mutant study program or something.” The gun is pushed harder into Clint’s chest. “Sounds like the start of an internment camp or something, to me. Is that what SHIELD wants with me? To lock me up? It won’t do you much good.”

“No,” Clint says calmly, his eyes never leaving the target’s brown ones. Brown. Still okay then. “No, I’m not here for anything having to do with mutants. Or to lock you up. We don’t want anything from you, Bobby,” He keeps using the name that target has been using while he’s been on the run and hopes that it puts the target a little bit at ease. “We want to protect you.”

“And who’s going to protect you from me, Clint?”

Clint shakes his head a little, and never breaks eye contact. “You won’t hurt me. I know you, Bobby, and I know you won’t lose it right now. You don’t want to hurt people. If the military would just get off your back you’d be golden, yeah? You’ve learned to control it really well. It’s admirable. But they just won’t quit, yeah? And it’s shaking you all up. But you don’t want to hurt anyone. So you won’t hurt me. We’re good, yeah?”

The target closes his eyes and lets out a long, slow breath before shoving the gun into Clint’s hand. “I took that from one of your friends,” he murmurs. “You might want to make sure he has an extra set of pants. I’m pretty sure he pissed himself.”

“Did he shoot at you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

There’s a silence between them for a long while before the target asks, “How long will you watch me?”

“As long as you need to be protected,” Clint responds. “Or as long as they don’t need me somewhere else. But if they pull me, they’ll send someone else to protect you.”

The target sort of scoffs and says, “He’s never going to stop.”

Clint nods. “I know.”

“That’s a lot of time spent on protecting me. I don’t need it. He can’t kill me.”

Clint’s thoughts flash back to the target’s file, back to his attempted suicide. “I know. But everyone will be a lot safer if we get the General off your back, yeah?”

The target steps away from Clint and pinches the bridge of his nose, his brows furrowing. Then he scrubs his hands over his face and says, “I have to keep moving. They’re getting closer. I have to--,”

“How can you tell?” Clint asked, sharp eyes studying the target intensely.

He taps his temple and his eyes are a little less brown than they had been when he answers, “He can tell. Hasn’t failed me before.”

“Then go,” Clint says. “I’ll be right behind you.” The target’s eyes shift again and Clint murmurs, “My job is to make sure you still have your freedom at the end of the day. Go. My team... We’ve got you.”

And then the target is gone, leaping from this rooftop to the neighbor’s, and Clint gives himself a minute or two before checking his comm unit again.

* * *

It’s not until about a year later that Clint is pulled from surveillance detail and sent to New Mexico with Coulson. He leaves his notes, extensive and thorough, with Tash and says, “Don’t be scared of him, Tash. He likes kids and tea and he doesn’t sleep well most nights. He’s been in survival mode for so long that he believes he’s more animal than man, but he’s not. He’s just tired of all this shit.”

Natasha nods as she thumbs through the file, and Clint presses a brief kiss to her temple.

He whispers, “He’s kinda like how you used to be,” and her gaze is hard and terrified as she looks at him.

“Then I should be very afraid,” she whispers back.

“Just keep him safe,” Clint responds as he slings his bag and quiver over his shoulder and heads for Coulson’s office. “The change is painful for him. Don’t let it happen too often.” And then Natasha is left standing in the hall outside the SHIELD agent quarters of the helicarrier with a thick file in her hand and a grim set to her jaw. Her new assignment: surveillance of Dr. Robert Bruce Banner.

She wished she could have stayed on with Stark.


End file.
